A.J. Pollock — technically the most important player acquired by the San Francisco Giants at the trade deadline — is going to miss several weeks with an oblique injury. This leaves a gap in the Giants’ options for right-handed outfielders.
Enter Heliot Ramos for what feels like the 700th time. Technically, he’s been added to the active roster just five times in his career, and it’s been only 16 months since his major-league debut. He shouldn’t have a reputation as an organizational player yet, but that’s the vibe he’s giving off. Twitter isn’t abuzz about Ramos getting called up. KNBR isn’t humming with callers who are fired up about Ramos Time, excited that he’s the cavalry charging over the hill. Which is mostly understandable, considering his limited success in the majors so far.
But I’m here to explain why you should still care about Heliot Ramos and hold optimistic thoughts about his future with the Giants. He’s not a player to refer to in the past tense, and he’s not someone who can’t have a long career with this organization. Not yet.
🔨 Heliot 🔨 pic.twitter.com/Q5CybDXhHt
— Sacramento River Cats (@RiverCats) August 2, 2023
Start with the simple bureaucracy of it all: Ramos has an option for next year. That alone makes him valuable to the organization, if nothing else. If he were removed from the 40-man roster, the Giants would have to replace him with an outfielder who has both options and potential. Which is to say that they’d simply look for another, lesser version of Ramos.
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That’s not the only argument, though. Let’s take one of the best young players in the Giants’ organization right now, Casey Schmitt. Do you think he’s a flop, a failure, a misallocation of resources because he struggled so mightily in the majors? No, you don’t. It was a rough slog after the initial excitement, but the defense and the bat-to-ball skills still give him a chance at an above-average career in the majors.
Ramos is six months younger than Schmitt.
This isn’t brought up as a reason to disparage Schmitt’s chances to succeed. No, Schmitt is on a familiar path, in which the top prospect struggles mightily in the majors, then goes back to the minors to regroup. It’s happened to everyone from Matt Williams to Rich Aurilia, and it’s a reminder that development is rarely linear.
The difference in the perception is that Ramos was drafted in 2017. That’s when Carlos Moncrief was wowing Giants fans with his rifle arm and Jae-gyun Hwang was going to lead the team back to the World Series. It was seven years ago, but it might as well be a million. Some prospects make the uneasy transition to eternal and undead prospect, and Ramos is one of them. Too young to think he’s doomed organizational filler; too familiar to get excited about him.
Maybe it’s possible to get a little excited about him, though.
Start with what Ramos’ biggest problem has traditionally been: beating balls into the ground more than the average hitter. He doesn’t have a fly-ball swing, which mutes his fast-twitch reflexes and big-tools frame. The Giants have worked with him on getting more loft in that swing, which isn’t a result you get during a quick conversation over a three-martini lunch. It’ll take time.
The early results are somewhat promising, with Ramos going from a high 48.9 percent ground-ball rate in Triple A last year to a 44.6 percent ground-ball rate this year, which is comfortably below the major-league average. A Ramos with more balls in the air could be a dangerous Ramos.
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More important than any of the batted-ball stats, though, is that Ramos has been raking in Triple A over the past month. Since returning to the Sacramento River Cats on July 3, he’s hit a cool .330/.377/.650, with six homers in 106 plate appearances. He was hitting .400 in August, when the Giants recalled him, and the power is consistently showing up in game situations. His exit velocity has been strong, and he clubbed two of the hardest-hit balls in all of Triple A just this past weekend. It’s possible that the changes the Giants are suggesting for him are taking.
He’s still 23, remember. Just a couple of months older than Wade Meckler, our once and future king. He deserves more runway than he’s gotten.
When you skim through the best outfielders in baseball, the top tier is a bunch of freaks who were in the majors and dominating before they were 22 years old. But that second tier looks mighty familiar.
Adolis García is on the Rangers because they bought him with sweet, sweet cash, and the Cardinals were happy to take it. He was 26 at the time of the trade, with a somewhat shiny OPS in Triple A (.818), but a lopsided strikeout-to-walk ratio and no path to the majors.
Lane Thomas is raking for the Nationals, who came over from the Cardinals in the Jon Lester deal in 2021. When he was Ramos’ age, he was putting up superficially strong numbers in Triple A, but with a similarly wonky K/BB ratio. He’s turned a corner, apparently. Also, the Cardinals should probably take a break from trading outfielders if they can help it.
Chas McCormick had a .696 OPS in Double A when he was Ramos’ age. Now he’s thriving and an important hitter on a World Series contender in Houston.
Anthony Santander is a key cog in the Orioles’ machine, and he was a regular on the Norfolk-to-Baltimore shuttle when he was Ramos’ age. He had a ho-hum season in the majors before last year, and now he’s arrived at the perfect time for a contending team.
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Cedric Mullins is also a key cog in the Orioles’ machine, and his OPS+ in the majors when he was Ramos’ age was 86. His OPS+ the next season was -6. Since then, he’s made an All-Star team and finished in the top 1o of an American League MVP race.
Austin Slater had over 1,000 at-bats in Triple A, which isn’t usually the path for productive and helpful major leaguers. He elbowed his way onto the Giants’ roster and never looked back.
Development isn’t linear. Write that 50 times on the blackboard like Bart Simpson in detention. Development isn’t linear. Development isn’t linear. Development isn’t linear. Development isn’t linear. And when you’re looking at a 23-year-old with first-round tools and a sketchy statistical pedigree, the only reason to be skeptical from an organizational standpoint is if you really need the 40-man roster spot ahead of the Rule 5 Draft.
If the Giants didn’t protect Ramos in this year’s Rule 5 Draft, they’d probably go into it looking for a major-league-ready right-handed hitting outfielder. Maybe they’d draft Ramos from themselves. Not sure how that would work. More importantly, though, is that Ramos would be even better than a Rule 5 pick for the Giants next season because he’d have an option year left. It would be a soft commitment for the Giants, which is good, considering how fluid their roster tends to be.
I’m not here to suggest that you should be as excited for Ramos as you were for Luis Matos, or that he’s going to fashion a season as valuable as García, Thomas, McCormick, Santander, Mullins or Slater have offered this year. Just don’t forget about him. Don’t relegate him to the dustbin of your brain. Not yet. Youth is on his side, and his Sacramento performances in July and August should make you curious, at the very least.
If there’s a twist in the story, it’s that the team might not be quite as enthusiastic. If you disagree with that, remember that the Giants traded for Pollock instead of doing the easier move and calling up Ramos. The Pollock trade seems like a vote of no confidence in Ramos from the organization. Maybe that’s an overread, but there was an active decision to acquire an injured 30-something having a horrible season instead of endorsing Ramos’ ability to help the 2023 team. That probably means more than Ramos’ Triple-A stats, at least from a predictive standpoint.
How good will Ramos’ career be? I’ll take the under, just to be a curmudgeon. There’s still work to be done on the swing. There’s still a tendency to swing first and ask questions later.
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Still, there’s also a strong chance that Ramos will eventually become a major-league player, which means he shouldn’t be tossed overboard like a piece of flotsam if a team can help it. This isn’t Ramos’ only chance with the Giants. This isn’t the second-to-last chance he’ll get, either, and he might get a third or a fourth chance next year. The engine’s good on this one. The engine’s good.
Don’t give up on him yet, and, heck, reserve a little excitement for his newest trial. If he hits like he was in Sacramento, he might be exactly what the Giants were looking for.
If it doesn’t work out, don’t worry. He’ll be back next year. Development isn’t linear, and sometimes these things take a while.
(Photo of Ramos: Darren Yamashita / USA Today)
